Spirit Lost (7 page)

John agreed, but still the afternoon lay before them.

“You know what it is?” Willy said, perching in a chair facing her husband, sticking her hands into the pockets of the caramel-colored down vest she often wore. “It’s that we don’t have any workers in the house or about to arrive. The first three weeks people were always showing up: the movers with the furniture, the carpenters and the mason, and so on. There was all that rushing around trying to decide where to put the linens and unpacking the china and rearranging the sofas, and as soon as we got that done, we rushed around getting ready for Thanksgiving, and the Hunters arrived. Now we’re really moved in.”

“Mmm,” John said. A familiar sulkiness was settling over him, an old childhood reaction to boredom. He vaguely wanted to argue or complain. “We shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “I probably made an enormous mistake. Moving us here. Giving up my job. Part of what I feel today is because I know I don’t have anywhere to go tomorrow. No office, no friends, no schedules or commitments. All the days are going to seem the same from now on.”

“Nonsense,” Willy said, smiling. She didn’t mind coaxing him away from the doldrums; he did this for her regularly, once a month, when she was premenstrual. “You’re going to make a schedule for yourself. And you’re going to paint. You’re going to work. You’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

She moved over to the sofa and cuddled next to her husband. “It’s bound to take some time to get started. You can’t expect it to happen all at once. There can’t be the same sense of furious activity that goes on at the agency, where there are so many people. So it will seem like everything’s happening super slowly. But you will be able to work, John. I know it. I’m sure of it. And just think,” she went on, snuggling closer, “you’ll have a freedom you never had before. I mean, if you want to stop working, if you should get some kind of uncontrollable urge …” She nibbled on his ear and down his neck as she talked. She ran her hand under his sweater and began to unbutton his shirt. “We’ll have the luxury of long afternoons together.…” she whispered, nuzzling her head against his chest.

But Willy had started John thinking about his work, and he was suddenly restless with a need to get up to the attic, to start
being
there, thinking about what he wanted to
do.

John took both his wife’s hands in his and kissed them. “I love you, Willy,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” He pushed her away from him gently. “Look,” he said, “I want to go up to the attic for a while now. Just because it’s Sunday doesn’t mean I can’t work. I just want to go up for a while and think about where to start. Okay?” He kissed her forehead; Willy was making a pouty face, but he could tell by her eyes that she was kidding. “Listen,” he said, “you’re the one who started me thinking about my work. It’s your fault.”

“Mmm,” Willy said, pushing herself up off the sofa and stretching. “It’s all right. And you’re right—you’re free now to paint whenever you want. Sundays, evenings—in the middle of the night if you want. You don’t have to wake up early for work or be fresh for the office. It’s really kind of marvelous when you think about it. Well, do go on up for a while. I think I’ll get a start on my holiday fruitcakes. It’s a good day for baking.”

John sat on the sofa and watched his wife walk through the dining room and into the kitchen. Every year she baked rich, moist cakes laced with bourbon and brilliant with jewellike green-and-red cherries, and with dates and nuts. She sent these off to their distant older relatives and to the friends who especially liked fruitcakes. She and John seldom ate it themselves. But Willy liked making fruitcakes. Liked having them sit wrapped in silver foil, secretly growing darker, richer, each day. Liked sending homemade gifts to friends. John envied Willy. There seemed no end to the pleasurable tasks she thought up for herself. Already she was humming carols softly to herself as she moved around the kitchen, setting out the ingredients. She was better at solitude than he.

But he could learn. He would learn. He hoisted himself up off the sofa and tromped up the two flights of stairs to the attic.

The large open attic ran the entire length and width of the house; it was thirty feet wide and seventy feet long, for their house was long and narrow. The stairs leading from the first to second floor were decorated with nicely turned balustrades and a rather ornately carved walnut newel post; the steps themselves were dark-stained walnut, carpeted by the previous owners in a slate blue. At the top of the stairs a long hallway began, leading to the three bedrooms and bathroom. At the front of the hall was a large window looking down onto Orange Street and a doorway leading to the more primitive stairs to the attic.

These were unstained boards of no particular excellence. The attic had unstained
wide-board floors, unpainted wide-board walls, and great stretches of white Sheetrock covering the insulation that had been put in the attic ceiling. At the front of the attic was one large window looking down over Orange Street, and at the back was a window of similar size that gave a view of the hill slanting down to the harbor, with its large and small boats. John had put his easel near this window, not for the light so much as for the view, which would be restful to his mind and eyes. In the middle of the attic there was a sort of built-in wooden ladder of nine very wide wooden steps that led in a steep incline to the widow’s walk. The former owners had replaced the original door to the widow’s walk with a skylight, so that the attic, even on this dark day, was filled with a gentle illumination.

Small raindrops fell in random splatters on the roof and skylight, blown only now and then by gusts of wind. The effect was of birds walking on the roof or small animals moving around inside the walls. John wondered if there were animals in the walls—mice, rats. They had found a dead rat in their driveway last week, and Willy, who was usually sensible, had freaked out. Now she wanted very much to get a cat, and John was trying to find one to give her for Christmas. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to be the season when cats had their litters. He wasn’t having much luck.

John perched on the high stool he often used while painting. There was still so much that needed to be done up here. The electrician who was to put in the banks of fluorescent lights had come once, then disappeared, and now didn’t return the call John left on his answering machine. The carpenter, who had promised to build some shelves to hold John’s paints and supplies, had also never come back. But the Realtor had laughed when John called to ask him about it.

“There is no unemployment on Nantucket,” the Realtor told him. “For every plumber and carpenter and electrician on Nantucket, there are fifty families desperate for their services. Besides, they like to go off scalloping. People say there are two speeds here: slow and stop. They’ll get around to you sooner or later. Don’t take it personally. You’ll just have to learn to relax about it.”

Relax. John looked around the attic. His paints and brushes and chalks and new canvases were still in cardboard boxes, and he couldn’t unpack them unless he wanted to put them right on the floor. Eight naked electric bulbs hung from cords with pull chains at various spots in the attic, so that the lighting was fine, if a little primitive, for normal living but too filled with shadows and dark hollows for painting. And it was cold, John
realized. There was no heat in the attic at all. If he left the door from the second floor open at the bottom of the stairs, some heat would rise from the rest of the house. But he would have to get some space heaters if he wanted to stay up here for any length of time.

He stepped down from his stool, found a scratch piece of paper, and began making a list. Perhaps he would bring a radio up here, perhaps a stereo. Willy liked listening to music while she worked; perhaps he would, too. It would be very quiet here after working at the Blackstone Group, whose offices were filled with talk and noise or whispers or at least the sounds of other people moving around.

Space heaters, he wrote. Stereo. Trees topped? Willy had suggested this when they moved in, because she loved a water view. With this window as a frame, only the top third of the picture showed blue water, harbor, and the curving sands of Coatue and Monomoy. The rest of the picture, the majority of it, was filled with rooftops, backyards, winding lanes, picket fences, and the intricate tangle of branches, twigs, and limbs of the old maple trees that grew in their backyard. It the trees were topped, they could get a clearer view of harbor and sky. If not, they would pretty much lose their water view in the summer when the leaves were out.

John turned a page on his sketch pad and began to pencil in the twisting, delicate lines of the trees. The trunks and larger branches were knobby, the smaller branches shot off in odd angles from the center, making awkward turns until the smallest twigs stuck out their dried buds like a child’s stick-figure drawing of fingers on a hand.

He sketched rapidly, with a sense of determination filling him and a hint of the feeling of joy that came upon him when he was happy with his work. It was this, after all, that he wanted to capture—it was for this that he had come to Nantucket. He had come to find the natural, the awkward, the awry, the real. His mind, his eye—his soul—were tired of the perfect symmetry and glaring artificial brightness of color in the ads he worked on. He longed for the stunted, the stubby, the muted, the cracked. He wanted to capture the beauty of such things, of these tangled boughs or of the leaves that had fallen from them, which once were green and pliable and now lay shriveled, brittle, and brown, piled by the wind against the fence. All this was as much a part of any human being’s life as the perfect. These bare trees, dry leaves, were as beautiful and as valuable as any almond-sided refrigerator or eye-shadowed, rouged, and lipsticked model. If he could capture this truth …

He drew on, exhilarated. Slowly the light faded from the sky so that at last he
could not see even the branches of the trees nearest him. Night had fallen.

He put down his sketch pad and found the one he had taken with him to the beach the previous week. He had made brief, rough drawings of the ocean, a sailboat, a gull riding on the wind. But the drawing that pleased him the most now was one of pebbles, shells, and seaweed cast up on the shore. In any given square foot of beach, the variety and subtlety of shape and color were amazing. He had not had his paints with him but had scribbled in the colors he wanted to duplicate and drawn arrows from the word to the appropriate shell or stone: coral, dun, peach, plum, washed gray, pale brown, faded blue. Most colors had been dulled by the weathering of sand and sea. He had walked along the shoreline a long way before the dark dappling of stone and shell was broken by one small rock covered by seaweed. The seaweed was still alive, and it was a brilliant emerald green, streaming over the rock and down toward the sea like a woman’s hair. That hair … John flipped over to a clean sheet of paper and began to sketch. Long, thick, streaming dark hair flowed across his page; he was drawing the woman’s head from the back, and he could get only the faintest suggestion of a profile turned toward him. The profile, the face, wasn’t important now; only the thick, abundant, streaming dark hair mattered.

John glanced up at the darkened attic window and saw a woman there, just on the other side of the glass.

A young woman in a black cape, her back to him, her profile obscured by the waves of dark hair that streamed down from her head, around her shoulders, to her waist, was out there in the air.

Startled, he dropped his pencil on the floor, and the clatter it made as it hit the wooden boards was immense.

“What the hell?” John said.

The woman in the window disappeared. The window was blank, black.

John rubbed his hands over his eyes. He looked at his watch. It was after five. He had been working for over four hours, and he was exhausted. This had happened to him before—not a hallucination but the same plunge from intense euphoria to sudden, complete fatigue. It was like being dropped from the high of a drug. He was more pleased than frightened by his hallucination—how vivid it had been!—and it seemed to him that this meant he was really starting to work now, that he was at last beginning to tap into his true artistic core.

He was immensely happy. He shuffled his papers and pads back into order and
got ready to go downstairs. He couldn’t wait to share all this with Willy, to tell her how well his work had gone. On the first day! He wanted to share his sense of achievement with her, knowing that she would be happy for him.

He wouldn’t tell her about the hallucination, though. It had been so brief, so strange—Willy might take it too seriously. Or, worse, not seriously enough. No, he wouldn’t mention the hallucination to Willy. He had always envied her her sense of self-sufficiency, of being lost in another world, when she was at work on her embroidery. Her sense of having secrets. Well, now he had his secrets, too. He went down the attic steps and reached up to pull the chain that switched the last light off.